In the unforgiving wasteland of Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, a preening sociopathic warlord muses on the nuances of tears. The film unfolds as a breathtaking odyssey of death and destruction, where characters grapple with vengeance and enduring desire.
As the audience, we may find our eyes welling with awe at the endless stream of astonishing images that grace the screen. This beautifully crafted film is a machine of joy, even as it depicts a future devoid of it—a merciless post-apocalyptic hellscape.
Furiosa stands both blessed and burdened by its proximity to the modern classic Mad Max: Fury Road. Serving as a direct prequel, it forges a visual and narrative connection to its predecessor. However, it makes no attempt to overshadow or replicate that film’s jaw-dropping vehicular carnage.
Instead, Furiosa sprawls like the arid wasteland its characters traverse. It’s a bona fide novelistic epic, tracing the tragic origin of its title character, the metal-armed smuggler memorably portrayed by Charlize Theron in Fury Road.
Theron’s iconic performance looms over the film like a blazing sun, even though she doesn’t appear in this installment. The story begins in childhood, in a futuristic Eden from which a young Furiosa is snatched. This first chapter is a standalone masterpiece: a Western chase film in which the girl’s mother pursues her captors on horseback and motorbike, her shots echoing across the vast desert landscape.
An act of mercy costs the mother her life, and Furiosa falls into the clutches of Chris Hemsworth’s Dementus, a biker kingpin who presides over his caravan from a motorcycle chariot—an ingenious design choice that nods to the prominence of sword-and-sandal pictures within the Mad Max lineage.
Summoning his Thor-like arrogance without the redeeming nobility, Hemsworth crafts a villain who is a product of his barbaric environment, a swaggering monster whose casual cruelty seems ingrained from years of hardship.
A similar fate befalls Furiosa, who initially disappears into the plot, an innocent swallowed by the conflict between warring tribes. Her twisted guardian engages in a power struggle with the future tyrant Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme), taking over the role originated by the late Hugh Keays-Byrne.
Having lost her mother, Furiosa finds herself torn between two toxic father figures. Their rivalry echoes a political allegory: Dementus’s empty promises to war boys seeking to overthrow Joe ultimately reveal a choice between two sides of the same oppressive patriarchal coin.
Furiosa embodies a distinctly Dickensian structure. We witness the orphaned heroine’s成長, navigating the perils of a fallen world populated by Miller’s eccentric ensemble of vagabonds and rapscallions. Anya Taylor-Joy steps into the starring role, mesmerizing with her expressive eyes, conveying emotions with minimal dialogue.
Taylor-Joy’s performance echoes Theron’s portrayal, revealing the anguish beneath Furiosa’s fierce resolve. This film delves into the roots of that pain, enriching Fury Road in retrospect, shedding light on her transformation into the steely character we encounter in the later film.
Max’s absence is hardly felt, as Furiosa’s baptism in blood and petrol fills the void. Miller echoes the outlaw spirit of The Road Warrior and Fury Road through a proxy character, a wheelman and commander played with stoic sensitivity by Tom Burke.
Yet, the true star of Mad Max has always been its flavorful doomsday world-building, and Furiosa delivers in abundance. The costumes and production design, while not groundbreaking for the franchise, contribute to the rich tapestry of this post-apocalyptic realm.
Miller intentionally steers away from the locomotive momentum of Fury Road. Having ascended to action-cinema Valhalla, he stretches the Mad Max formula, crafting a more leisurely and expansive story of adolescence corrupted by rage. The episodic, chapter-book structure resembles Miller’s underrated Arabian Nights riff, Three Thousand Years of Longing.
The vehicular warfare may not rely as heavily on astonishing practical stunts, incorporating some digitally achieved effects. However, Miller’s imagination and masterful staging remain undiminished, resulting in relentless crosscutting of escalating violence that never sacrifices coherence.
Furiosa may not surpass its predecessor in terms of demolition derby spectacle, but it builds on the cyberpunk shock and awe of Fury Road with the addition of parachutes, construction equipment, and a flying machine straight out of a da Vinci sketchbook.
In its extravagant runtime, the film completes the Mad Max circle, returning to the revenge-thriller motives of the original Ozploitation classic. However, Miller subverts fan expectations, dropping Furiosa into the passenger seat of her own story, leading to a purposeful anti-climax, a final showdown devoid of crowd-pleasing satisfaction.
Does Furiosa achieve her sweet revenge? Her crusade for balance ends in a way that illuminates her actions and decisions in the future car chase feature. This is a bleak vision of the future, a would-be summer blockbuster of senseless death and misery.
Yet, it’s also a spectacle that never runs out of visual steam, offering one breathtaking image after another. Bikes swarm across the wasteland like insects, Hemsworth’s villain hangs precariously over a precipice as bullets loosen his grip, and a plant grows time-lapse fast around a scalp, conveying the changing seasons.
No matter how withering its worldview, Furiosa is a masterfully constructed film that delivers an unforgettable cinematic experience. With this prequel, Miller finds joy in a joyless place.
